


chaos is calling

by dancer4813



Series: the living and the dead (are one in the same) [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Nihilistic Attitude, Panic Attacks, Percy is not okay, Spoilers for Episodes 100 & 101, Tal'dorei Campaign, Writing Percy is pretty cathartic tbh, percy needs a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 09:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11273082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancer4813/pseuds/dancer4813
Summary: In the aftermath of their battle at the ziggurat, Percy feels the weight of the world on his shoulders.





	chaos is calling

**Author's Note:**

> A special thanks to [@cinderpaw1](http://cinderpaw1.tumblr.com/) for talking through some things about this fic with me, and helping me sort out Tary and Percy's conversation. Also, to Taliesin Jaffe, for torturing Percy enough in-canon that I don't feel too bad about hurting him more.

He sees her disappear and his heart feels like it’s ripped from his chest with the intensity of his fury. He fires with the pistol in his hand and the hammer seizes before the bullet fires, sending hot lines of pain up his arm directly to his brain.

Through the haze he whips out Bad News, but the rifle clicks, and tendrils of smoke unfurl from the gun, the black wisps bringing back memories of a silky voice in his head, of a beak-like face and the feeling of _vengeance-_

Percy pulls out Retort and a bullet flies true, hitting the sphere…

And disappears. Without a sound, without an impact, without fanfare.

As his hands start shaking, his knees give way beneath him.

 

Percy’s lungs feel as though he hasn’t breathed in hours, the way they are trying to suck in and push out the musky air around the ziggurat. His mind is working faster than it ever has, but is comprehending slower than usual, and even though he tries to make sense of things, tries to fix his guns (he picks up Animus and taps sharply on the bottom, the side, pulls the trigger, the actions routine, but it sticks and he knows he needs tools, needs a workshop, to fix Bad News espe-), tries to sort out the feelings in his head, he finds everything coalescing to a dull roar of sound that builds and builds and builds and-

There’s a hand on his shoulder.

Through the haze of _Deliliah_ and _Fix it_ and _Vengeance_ and _You were DEAD_ echoing through his mind, Vex’s face comes, breaking apart his thoughts with the concern in her eyes. Her other hand comes up to cup his cheek and he knows it’s her because of the fingers, calloused from the string of a bow and _so_ familiar (more than he would ever dare to imagine).

“You need to breathe, Percy darling,” she says, and he wants to say that he is breathing, that he’s perfectly fine, but the hand on his face moves to his chest, pushing gently, and he realizes just how fast everything is moving and he tries to slow down, the air catching in his lungs.

“That’s it, that’s it,” she encourages, and with another couple shuddering breaths the fog starts to clear from his mind and he hears the dull roar of the others discussing what to do next behind him.

“She’s back,” he gasps as soon as he has enough breath to, and Delilah’s broken body, stabbed and held against the wall by his sister, flashes through his mind – blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, her arm missing.

“I know,” Vex says, and it’s then that he remembers her near death at the ziggurat beneath Whitestone and he finds himself grabbing at her wrist, needing to feel her pulse despite her sitting right in front of him.

(Luckily she lets him more-or-less pull her onto his lap, so he can bury his face in her braid.

He remembers her lifeless body carried gingerly by Grog out of the anti-magic field, the desperation when the potions and healing spells didn’t take hold…

But she’s here and alive and dear _gods_ they’ve got a lot of work to do now.)

Percy counts to ten, telling himself to relax as he feels his breathing _finally_ start to slow down, and when he reaches the end of his count he forces his arms to let go, pulling back as he does so.

“Better?” Vex asks, and he nods (even though it isn’t exactly true), knowing that he can’t just sit around and let the others figure things out. This is his past coming back into play yet again. First the Briarwoods, then Ripley after he’d let her escape, and now Delilah, after he’d watched her body dissolve in a pool of acid.

Percy really hated magic sometimes. And would-be gods.

 

They spoke with her henchman about the portal, learning of the stones they needed to pass through safely, unless they wanted to run the risk of the harm it could do them.

(Percy wasn’t sure about the rest of Vox Machina, but he found himself much more worried about what they would need to deal with on the other side of that gate than he was about getting through it.)

He also has Vex’s promise to the Raven Queen running through his head non-stop, and if that wasn’t enough, they take a vote and decide they’re tapped out enough that Scanlan should re-cast the mansion, saving their plans for the next morning and leaving Percy with nowhere to spend his excess energy.

So he goes to bed with Vex after an unsatisfactory dinner and lays in bed until she falls asleep, then slips away. There’s no need to worry her more, not when she has her own demons to worry about, and he creeps out of the room, glad that Trinket is in the Raven’s Slumber so he doesn’t need to avoid waking the bear.

He wanders through the mansion, reacquainting himself with the eerily-familiar halls and taking note of the new changes – generally a subtler décor, a more fully equipped music room, and fewer mirrors scattered throughout.

The silence in the mansion isn’t malevolent, but it is unnerving, especially since the arcane nature of the mansion’s walls mean that while the enchanted windows show perfectly normal night skies, none of the house creaks in the wind or at someone’s footsteps. There are no places where the walls are too thin unless Scanlan plans them that way, and while some of the walls seem to be wooden, and others stone, there’s no difference to the sound they make when you tap your knuckles against them.

It’s like the perfect version of anyone’s house. No defects, no shoddy construction, and certainly none of the quirks that come with a home built from scratch.

 _At least_ , Percy thinks, finally deciding that he might as well get some work done instead of simply walking the halls, _despite its faults, it has some very nice bathrooms._

 

Percy retrieves his black powder carefully, glad to see that Vex still seems to be sleeping camly, and goes to the workshop that Scanlan has always created for him, but his mind is so busy that he doesn’t realize the door is already partly ajar until he pushes it open to see Tary at the work bench, head in his hands. Doty was at the side of the worktable, but he was leaning against the wall, eyes dark, the plates on his chest caved in from the force of the spells that had struck him down.

Percy felt himself freeze as Tary looked up, eyes wide. Neither of them had expected company, and while they had spent the better part of the last year sharing workshop space…

“Oh- hello, Percival,” Tary says, straightening up and trying to appear as though he hasn’t been worried.

“Hello, Tary,” Percy replies, trying to muster a smile, though it feels like more of a grimace. “Are you working on something?”

Tary pulls back from the table, revealing a pristine work surface. “Not exactly,” he murmurs, running his fingers through long flaxen hair. “I didn’t realize I would be able to tinker on the go – I left nearly all of my supplies in Vex’s mansion, packed in my bags. I _would_ fix Doty, but…”

His voice trails off, and Percy understands the pained look on his face before he drops his gaze to the floor.

“Well, I was just going to make some bullets,” he offers, “if you’re interested in helping?”

He would be a hypocrite if he criticized Tary’s lack of sleep, and as he had learned it was always good to have an extra pair of hands. Those hands used to be Keyleth’s, but since she’d been spending so much time in Zephra with her people, Percy had shown Tary what needed to be done one lazy afternoon in the workshop, and Tary, intelligent as he was, caught on quickly.

“If you need my help.”

“I always appreciate your help,” Percy says in lieu of an answer, and in an unfamiliar workshop after a harrowing battle, approaching what might be the biggest fight of their lives, it’s enough.

In silence they get out the black powder and the molds, and Tary starts the forge going. The heat suffuses the room, and Tary seems to relax as they get into a rhythm of melt, pour, release, melt, pour, release.

They refill the melting pot twice and cast a little over 30 bullets in all. Then they get to trim the excess casing from them, smoothing the edges so the bullets don’t get stuck in the chambers of his guns and fly true to strike their adversaries.

After meticulously examining five of the bullets they’ve made together, his mind starting to calm, his rational self having taken over in the presence of labor, Percy wipes a trickle of sweat out of his eye and looks over at Tary. The blond, who is staring at one of the bullets as if it has the answers to the universe, doesn’t look over when he clears his throat, and doesn’t even react until Percy sets a gentle hand on his shoulder, making him jump.

“Copper for your thoughts?”

Tary bites his lip, his gaze locking with Percy’s, then it falls back down to the bullet in his hands as he shrugs Percy’s hand off and sets the bullet aside.

“Who was she, the dark-haired woman?”

Percy blinks, and his hand, still outstretched toward Tary, sinks. They had given Tary the basic details of Whitestone’s takeover, but never the full story.

“Delilah Briarwood,” Percy replies evenly, torn between wanting to keep watching Tary and wanting to go back to the bullets to keep his hands busy. “She and her husband killed my family.”

“They took over Whitestone?”

“They did.”

“And now they’re back?”

“Delilah seems to be,” Percy says, and nope, fuck it, he needs something to do.

The scritch-scratch of metal against metal fills the room again.

“Not her husband?” Tary asks after a moment, taking another bullet.

“We killed him. Well, both of them,” Percy murmurs, brushing away the metal shavings left on the bullet and examining its curves. “I honestly didn’t expect either to come back, but I suppose I should stop having such low expectations of the universe’s desire to fuck with my life.”

It comes out more biting than he wanted it to, but Tary just nods and drops his first bullet into the pot of newly-finished ones.

“And she’s back to kill you?” Tary asks.

“Kill the world, more likely,” Percy replies, and his stomach turns as he feels a strong urge to throw the bowl of bullets to the ground and send them scattering, like ants underfoot. “You know Vex has been studying Vecna, yes?”

“She mentioned the name once or twice – was he her husband?”

Percy actually laughs at that, though it feels wrenched out of him like an arrow from a wound.

“No,” he gasps, getting his breath back. “Not quite. Her husband, Sylas, was a vampire whom Vecna brought back to life. Vecna, on the other hand….”

“Not a good guy?” Tary volunteers.

“Not a good guy,” Percy affirms, “He’s a lich who tried to ascend to godhood ages ago. Informally the god of secrets, and is also known as The Whispered One to his followers.

When Tary doesn’t ask anything else, Percy takes a deep breath, the smell of black powder filling his nostrils, and goes back to the bullets.

They work in relative silence for a while, until there’s only a bullet apiece left to grind the stub of the mold away from.

“Vex showed me the ziggurat under Whitestone,” Tary murmurs. “She said that I ‘should know there’s a potentially deadly calamity underneath the city’.”

“Vex always has been the clever one.”

“I don’t know, you’re pretty clever,” Tary says, and then he recoils slightly, blushing.

Percy smiles at the unintentional flirting.

“I’m going to say what I said earlier – I’ll take the compliment.”

Tary chuckles half-heartedly, but Percy can see that the man has a complicated look on his face, much like Percy imagines his own mind to be – an amalgam of emotions that, in his current state of mind, he’s not able to sort out.

“Could you tell me what happened?”

It’s certainly more vague a question than Percy had anticipated, but he thinks he knows what Tary’s getting at.

“Do you want it from the beginning? It’s not a happy story,” Percy warns, and while part of him is wary to recount the tale, he distantly wonders if going through the tale again might help him pick up on a detail he’d missed, or understand something that they might have glossed over in the moment.

“Since coming out into the world I’ve learned that not all stories have happy endings,” Tary says, chuckling.

“It’s a sad but real truth,” Percy agrees. “But if you’re sure…”

Tary nods, and Percy takes a deep breath before beginning.

He tells the story, from the Briarwoods fleeing Wildmount and running to Whitestone to their overtaking the city and laying low for many years. He speaks briefly to his own escape, and then jumps to when he had first heard their names after so long – just after Vox Machina had returned from the Underdark. He tells about their return, and how Vox Machina helped him take back his city, and he explains the ritual (or what he had seen of it) that Delilah performed at the top of the ziggurat under Whitestone.

(And Percy’s never had this before – someone who will listen who knows him, knows some of where he’s coming from, but who hasn’t lived those experiences with him – and he feels an ache in his chest knowing that Tary has set his heart on returning to Wildmount as soon as possible.)

Pressing on, he explains in detail, the images imprinted on his mind, Sylas and Delilah’s deaths, though he tries to leave Orthax’s involvement out of that as much as possible. He finishes with Cassandra’s death blow to Delilah and the subsequent throwing of the necromancer in acid.

He looks up at Tary just in time to catch a distinctly green tinge to the man’s cheeks, and his lips turn up in a smirk at the thought, _May you never change, Tary._

“And that’s the story?” Tary asks, swallowing, the glimpse of nausea fading.

“That’s it.”

“You know, I always had ‘defeat an evil wizard’ on my list,” he hums with a wry smile. “But it seems like you’ve all done that already. How many things _have_ you done that I’ve been waiting my whole life to do?”

“Probably everything on your list and then some,” Percy admits, “Though I’m still not sure about the ‘rescuing a damsel’. The stories really are wrong about how often there are _any_ damsels.”

“Mmhmmmm…”

“Is there something else on your mind?”

Tary’s mouth twists into a frown, eyes narrowing as he thinks.

“You said the Briarwoods hailed from Wildmount, once upon a time?”

“Yes – do you know where they might have come from?”

“Not where, exactly, but I do remember there being a bit of uproar six or seven years ago, in the north. There were rumors, never anything concrete, but people started to go missing, and my mother always wanted eyes on us if at all possible, despite my being of age at the time. There was some political upheaval, I remember that, and Maryanne was constantly talking about her friends who lived up there – she said-“

He frowns again, tapping the side of his temple as if it will push the memories into his head.

“What she learned from them, was that one city in particular seemed to be drawing people in, only for them to disappear. I never heard specific names – honestly, I wasn’t very interested at the time, too involved in my fantasies as I was.” Tary gives chuckles again, and shrugs. “I know it’s not much to go on…”

“No, no, it’s something,” Percy argues, taking out his notebook from his bag and flipping to a clean page to draft a quick outline of the known lands of Exandria. Wildmount to the Northeast, Tal’dorei taking up the middle, Issylra to the Northwest, and even, further west, though slightly more south, Marquet.

It’s a sad excuse for a map, he knows, and he imagines Tyriok, the mapmaker, looking at it disdainfully before he quickly jots down the locations of the two ziggurats they’ve been to, in Whitestone and about a days’ walk north of Ank’harel.

“You said it was in the far north of Wildmount?” he asks Tary, who nods.

“Yes, though I’m not sure where. At least a couple days north of Deastok, though still in the Dwendalian Empire.”

Percy makes a dotted circle around the northern half of the continent, not knowing its geography well enough to have a decent bead on where a former temple to Ioun might be…

“There’s one in Vasselheim,” he realizes, glancing over the blank areas on his map.

“There’s a what?”

“A ziggurat,” Percy says, and he wonders why he hadn’t seen it before. Osysa had come from behind one in the temple of Ioun, when they had received their brands from the Slayer’s Take.

“In Vasselheim?” Tary asks, and Percy nods frantically, already marking its rough location.

“There’s one on every continent,” Percy notes, but as soon as he’s said it he feels a swooping sense of dread. “But what if there’s more?”

“More?”

“There’s already three that we know of that have siphons,” Percy points out, and he sets his pencil down as he feels his hands start to tremble. “How many more might they have turned? How many-“

He cuts himself off, realizing the sheer scope of the task before them, and suddenly he feels like he might gag on the sheer enormity of the task set out for them. Ziggurats all over the world, travel to another plane as Vex and Pike had seen… This was so much bigger than just Whitestone. He’d heard the answers to Pike’s questions from the dead man’s lips, he’d known since their first encounter with the ziggurat in Whitestone that Vecna was trying to return through the Briarwoods, but to see, tangibly, laid out before him, the scope of the Vecna’s plans?

“Percy? Percy, look at me,” Tary says, and Percy does so, though it hardly feels as though he’s inhabiting his own body in that moment.

“Percy?”

“We were _nothing_ to them,” Percy mutters, instead of the hesitant placation that had been on his lips, an incredulous sort of chuckle pulled from his lungs as he shakes his head. “ _Nothing_.”

“To who? To whom? The Briarwoods? Percy, you’re starting to scare me-“

“You should be scared,” Percy says, and he remembers Tary when they first met him, shying away from anything and everything. “And… all of us, all of them, have just been some stepping stones on their way up, no more than irritating pebbles in their boots.”

“Percy-“

Tary’s voice seems to get stuck in his throat, and Percy understand that, wants to be empathetic, but then Tary’s hand presses down on his shoulder and its grounding, it’s solid, and even if it’s not quite enough to steady him entirely, he takes a breath.

“My whole family, Tary, my whole city. We were pawns to them, plebeians that they didn’t mind crushing under their boots. We were nothing in their eyes, less than nothing. They walked over us like leaves on the ground and even when we try to get rid of them they come back. We are _nothing._ ”

Percy chokes on his last sentence, laughing again, and almost unconsciously grabs at Tary’s arm to keep himself steady. He’s always considered himself nihilistic, but this is something more, something new, in the wake of a lifetime of life and fate sticking up their middle finger in his face. “They just breezed through, and when they had left their mark they breezed away and kept going – they’re like cockroaches. They just _never-“_

“Stop.”

Tary’s interruption comes with a light slap to the face and Percy blinks hard, the surface pain working its way through his skull to join the headache he seems to have grown in the back of his head without him knowing it.

“I’m not going to hear you self-depreciate like that,” Tary says, and Percy blinks again, his vision clarifying on the man who is older than him, but looks younger, and who, at one point, seemed so naïve to the world around him. “Alright? Can you do that?”

“I- I can-“

He wants to lie, wants to say he’ll be fine, that he’s just had a long day, they all have…

“I can try,” his mouth says instead, and Tary’s eyes sparkle at that, his frown softening.

“I know something about hating yourself, let me tell you,” Tary says. “And I know it sucks, and I know it’s a loud voice in your head, but you especially have helped me move beyond that, right?”

He nods encouragingly, and Percy copies the gesture, head bobbing slightly. His guns, the destruction they caused, the victories they’d won… It all seemed to pale for a moment in comparison to what was looming on the horizon.

“Now, I’m headed home soon.”

Percy hums in agreement, and the dull ache in his chest sharpens slightly.

“And you know my reasons, but you all? You understand saving the world. You’ve got years of experience and practice that I could only dream of. I know you all don’t want to say it, but you are all so talented and so powerful…”

Percy scoffs before he can help himself, and it earns him a glare from Tary.

“Again, I know you don’t want to believe it, but you _are_ ,” he says, shaking Percy’s shoulders slightly for emphasis. “Can you understand that? That you’ve all done good and you’re going to do it again?”

“Maybe?” Percy says, because he really doesn’t know, and he feels like the whole world is going to crash down on him for a moment-

“Hey, stop that.”

Percy’s vision refocuses on the man in front of him, expensive armor dented and hair looking slightly windswept despite having been under a helmet all day.

“I’m going to tell you what you should do, okay?” Tary offers, and Percy nods, letting himself take a deep breath.

“Excellent. You are going to go to the kitchen with me and get some calming tea, alright? And then we’re going to get you back to bed with Vex and you’re going to sleep until morning, when we can _do_ something about things, alright?”

Percy opens his mouth to refuse, but he finds himself nodding yet again. He feels wrung out and almost like he’s drowning under the weight of everything that needs to be done, everything that they’re going to do. Perhaps sleep will help.

“Sounds like a plan,” Tary says with a grim smile, and a pat on the back as he stands up. “Now, do you know the way back to the kitchen, or should we call for a servant to show us the way?”

“I’ve got it,” Percy says, because he does know, and it’s something to do.

And as his feet carry him up the stairs and down the hallway, Tary’s footsteps echoing behind his own in the silence of the magical mansion, Percy takes a deep breath, pushing himself forward.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to see me recommend fanfics, cry with me about the cast and NPCs alike, or watch me spaz out during the episodes check out my main blog: [dancer4813](http://www.dancer4813.tumblr.com), or my writing tumblr: [dancerwrites](http://www.dancerwrites.tumblr.com).


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